White City

About This Title

In White City Mark Irwin makes stunning jumps in imagination to create poetry that is Rilkean in conception and execution, yet speaks to America at the end of the 20th century. Irwin's vision for American is as broad as Walt Whitman's while his language is propelled by changing rhythms, lush music and fresh imagery. As in Quick, Now, Always (BOA Editions, 1996), the poems in White City deal with a past that is beyond recovery ("before the word had become motor"), a future that is ominous and a present that is uncertain. "Do we belong where we are going," Irwin asks in "Wind," "or where we are?"

Someone

is building an invisible city
before us. They work slowly at night while history
is forfeited in sleep, or during brief intervals
of day when we forget, or gaze out
windows. The city both is and is larger than our dreams
where some of us visit, carrying our hearts
like red lanterns, which from a distance resemble
a carnival of joy so resplendent and sunstruck
we revisit those white walls time and again,
casting against that world the rose landscape
of our bodies, what some call our lives,
until one spring, gazing perfectly at both flowers
and stars, we become the enormous hope of forgetting.